The minimalism of the window manager is actually its real strength. It doesn’t come with panels, file managers or even a menu. You pick and choose whatever you want, that is, you are not a prisoner of a fixed desktop environment (DE) – you are in control.

And below, with a DE…created by Vitor Lopes, not yet available for Ubuntu.…called Jade…

I just added Nemo as the default file manager to Openbox, and it boots much faster than Thunar. Also, Nemo has inbuilt search, which Thunar doesn’t, plus all kinds of options that other file managers don’t have. Looks like, the “old” Nautilus 3.4 was the best ever file manager that happened to Linux!

Decided to check, if gnome classic (gnome 2 lookalike) would work Ubuntu without any breakage. Well, if it is the default DE of CentOS, why not here. First tried with both panels, then deleted one of them, leaving one to work as long ago Gnome 2. Then, thinking of what @bavarianph was saying about the Cairo dock, installed it, even though it is not maintained for quite a long time, most of the needed add-ons worked, even the weather applet.

Only package that has the name gnome shell is the gnome-shell-common, as it is need for gnome-tweak-tool. Otherwise, that package also can be uninstalled. Nautilus or any other file manager is installed manually.

RHEL and CentOS use GNOME Classic which is just a different mode of GNOME Shell (so it uses a different theme and some default GNOME Shell extensions sort of like the Ubuntu mode). GNOME Flashback on the other hand uses gnome-panel.

Yes, it is Gnome Flashback. Mentioned the word classic automatically. The default Ubuntu don’t have Gnome tweaks too, so cannot change fonts, icons, themes etc without it. As you are the maintainer of Gnome Tweaks, is it possible to take off the gnome-shell-common dependency from Gnome Tweaks?